Geographic information systems generally include information associated with a plurality of entities (e.g. businesses, restaurants, points of interest, landmarks, etc.). For instance, such associated information can include a name, phone number, location, category URL, email address, street address, hours of operation, and/or other information associated with the entity. Such information may be stored in an entity directory having one or more entity profiles associated with one or more entities. Conventional techniques of populating an entity directory can include manually inputting information into the entity profiles.
Other techniques can include matching one or more images depicting the entity to a corresponding entity profile, and populating the entity profile based at least in part on information associated with the image. For instance, optical character recognition (OCR) or other techniques can be performed on an image that depicts a storefront of an entity to determine information associated with the entity. The entity can then be matched with an entity profile based at least in part on the determined information.
Such OCR techniques can be unreliable. For instance, the OCR the images may contain one or more features or defects that lead to an inaccurate transcription of text depicted in the image. For instance, an image may include an occluded view of the storefront, blurring issues, stitching issues, etc. As another example, the storefront may include signage that is difficult to transcribe using OCR. For instance, the signage may be crowded or busy, or the signage may include “fancy” fonts that are difficult to transcribe.